Discover the use of the chamfer tool to eliminate sharp corners in creating a support beam for a children's outdoor playground. Learn how to adjust the size and angle of the corner using the chamfer tool and how to create a panel assembly for stair steps support.
Key Insights
- The chamfer tool in SolidWorks allows users to cut a notch out of a corner in a design. In this example, the tool is used to eliminate sharp corners in a children's outdoor playground by cutting corners in the beams for a handrail.
- The size and angle of the corner cut by the chamfer tool can be adjusted. The tutorial demonstrates how to change the size of the corner to one inch and to adjust the angle to a clean 45 degrees, which happens to be one of the default settings on a chop saw.
- The tutorial also includes guidance on creating a panel assembly to support stair steps. This process involves starting a sketch and creating a stair step support pattern, followed by setting the lines vertically and horizontally as required.
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In this video, we're going to use the chamfer tool for the first time. We're also going to create a support beam for our stair steps and use the split line tool to separate that into individual panels. All right, so because this is an outdoor playground for children, we want to eliminate sharp corners.
And we're creating sharp corners now with our beams for our handrail. So let's go ahead and fix that. One way we could do it, as you know, would be just to cut a triangle out of each of these beams.
But I'm going to show you a different way. If we go to features in the command manager and go to this fillet button, there's a drop down menu. The second button on that is called chamfer.
And that essentially cuts a notch out of a corner for us. Let's go to items to chamfer and go to this beam here and select this outside edge. If we zoom in, you can see it's beginning to cut a corner for us.
So let's adjust the size and the angle of that corner. Right now, it's pretty small. It's 0.1 inches.
Let's make that one inch. And we can adjust the angle and also flip the direction by which that angle is expressed. But let's go ahead and just make it a clean 45 degrees.
Right, because in theory, we'd be cutting this ourselves and we would be using a chop saw. And 45 degrees happens to be one of the default settings on a chop saw. It makes our life easier during fabrication.
Let's go with that. Let's go ahead and close it out with the green check mark. You can see that it cut a nice little notch.
You might have guessed that we have created a unique beam here. So let's go to our appearances tab. Right click on edit appearance.
Highlight this beam. Beautiful. And this is also a unique beam that doesn't have a chamfer.
So let's go ahead and add one there too along that corner. And like SolidWorks does, it has defaulted to the previous settings we had the last time we used that particular feature. In this case, let's keep it.
We have one inch by 45 degrees. Great. We'll close that out.
And there we go. Now, let's create the panel assembly to support each of our stair steps. So first, let's go into a sketch.
And it will be… Here we go. On this plane on this beam. I'm going to move back so I can see my feature tree.
All right. We'll start a sketch. Grab a line.
And start creating this stair step support pattern. I'm going down to the bottom right hand corner of the stair. Going over until I'm aligned vertically with the next stair.
So on and so forth. You can see I created some non-vertical lines. We'll go ahead and fix those.
I'll go back to line. It's fine to take your time. And I actually do recommend purposefully avoiding vertical lines.
We can go back and set them vertically. And make sure they have only the references that we want them to have. Go ahead and just create the support for each of these stair steps.
And we'll bring this one, say, almost to the front but not quite. All right. Let's connect that with that bottom corner.
Go along this bottom edge. And then click right to the top. Okay.
First things first. Let's make this horizontal. Let's make sure that this is vertical.
We can highlight each of our would-be vertical lines. And make them all vertical. Beautiful.
This line should also be vertical. Great. And we have essentially a good support beam.
Now, one thing I want to do is I don't want this entire thing to be one big wall. So let's go ahead and just trim it down a little bit. I'm going to go ahead, set a line here, and set a line here.
I want this to more or less be parallel with the direction by which the stairs are moving. So let's grab a center line. Snap to one end of a stair.
And then snap to the end of another stair. Highlight that line. Highlight this line.
Make them parallel to each other. And why don't we go ahead and set a distance between these two guys. We'll make that 24 inches.
Something robust. Now, here's the problem. We now have two closed entities, right? And both of these potentially could make their own boss extrude.
We don't want to do that. We want to eliminate unnecessary lines. So let's go up here to the Sketch tab to Trim Entities.
And if you hold down the mouse and drag it, it creates a trim line that's going to cut any line solid or dotted in its path. Let's cut this bottom part of the corner and cut this side part of the corner. Exit gets you out of that tool.
Looks like it lost a couple references. We'll just add those back in. And then we still have one more blue line here.
Let's make this overhang the same as this overhang. So I'm going to go ahead and create a center line condition here. One there.
Highlight the two. Make them equal. So this is nice and cleanly designed.
So far, it's looking good. Let's go ahead and make this our standard board thickness. Make sure it's running the right direction.
We'll do equals. Board thickness. Uncheck Merge Results.
